About Red Bean Software

Red Bean Software is a collectively-owned Internet server, hosted
in Chicago, Illinois, and administered by a group of friends and
colleagues around the world. Most of us are involved, in various
ways, in the Internet and in computer technology.

(No, Red Bean is not a real company — the front
page is just a joke. Believe it or not, we do get applications
sometimes, and once even an inquiry about purchasing the company.
Three cheers for due diligence.)

Red Bean was started in the mid-1990's by a couple of friends who
were tired of their email address changing every time they switched
jobs or schools. Their solution was to create a special domain,
"red-bean.com", to be their permanent home on the Internet.
As time went on, some their friends liked the idea and joined in. The
group is about 40 people large now, but remains strongly socially
interconnected — there is probably no one at Red Bean
who is more than one or two degrees away from anyone else here. See
our people page for more about the group,
including people's names; see the history and
charter page for a more detailed history.

Over the years, the range of services at Red Bean has expanded. It
started out hosting some personal email addresses and web pages. Now
it hosts mailing lists, software repositories, standards documents
(e.g. the SGF File Format) ... really, anything
that requires a stable address and a continuously online server. See
the stuff page for more.